This interview can be found in the new issue of Wasafiri Journal of International Literature.
Bejan Matur’s poetry is put down as
if engraved rather than written. Her ideas are expressed with a carved
simplicity, a resonant depth, formal control and an imagistic mastery which is
at once varied and disciplined. What she writes about, however, is shocking in
its jagged violence and unresolved grief. Matur was born in Maraş in Turkey and
writes mainly in Turkish. She is of Kurdish-Alevi heritage and her
experience has been one of injustice, discrimination, silencing, denial and
erasure. She witnessed the massacre of Alevis in her hometown during her
childhood and was tortured in prison during her university years. Her law
degree remained unused as she lost faith in established forms of language,
argument and authority to gain justice and convey the truth. In the aftermath
of torture, she turned to literature.
Matur’s poetry is a declamatory
reclamation of history, identity and land which, while it may be emotionally rooted
in her past, reads as universal. She could have been writing a thousand years
ago; she could be predicting the aftermath of wars to come, a thousand years
from now. Her poems evoke felled civilisations, buried truths and broken links.
Her narrators wander through a ravaged society in which the very stones are
soaked with mourning because of man’s inhumanity and violence. Rubble and earth
reverberate with grief, pain and longing. Nature absorbs what really happened
but cannot speak it back.
Matur is a prolific and award winning
poet whose work is gaining a strong English-speaking readership thanks to two
volumes produced by Arc Publications. In The Temple of a Patient God (2004)
contains an extensive selection of work from her first four collections: Winds
Howl Through the Mansions (1996); God Must Not See My Letters
(1999); Sons Reared By The Moon (2002); and In His Desert (2002).
The poems have been translated by Ruth Christie, who also translated Matur’s
most recent complete collection, How Abraham Abandoned Me (Arc
Publications, 2012), along with translator Selçuk Berilgen.
Most recently the Poetry Translation
Centre in London have produced the pamphlet If This is a Lament (2017), which
contains a career-wide selection of Matur’s poetry in new translations by Jen
Hadfield and Canan Marasligil. In this project the image of the razed homeland
abounds: it is depicted as a place that never was; a charred forest; a cold,
dead heart full of black stones. The landscape is alive, a repository for human
suffering in which “almond trees and stones…recognised me” but cannot speak
what they know. Nonetheless, nature can give comfort as well as reflect human
pain. In the poem Glacier, “White light from the depth of the glacier/ floods
into my skin.” Other people, however, provide less comfort. Even love is a
morbid union, a joined march towards death where “together, our hearts decay.”
Matur’s cynicism comes not from
iconoclastic contempt but from the devastation of cultural betrayal. Formal
religion is nothing more than a justification for political and cultural
abuses; a temple is “just a place”, she writes in the poem In The Temple of a
Patient God. Ritual has lost its ability to safeguard against annihilation, so
ceremonial robes are mere “roots swaying on the hanger”, symbols of death
rather than protection, “wan shrouds sweeping.”
Words, appearances, the official
version of events and voices of authority are not to be believed. But in the
absence of those, what is there? “What words can we use to speak of pain,/ in
what language can we ask to be forgiven?” asks Matur in Growing Up in Two Dreams.
We feel the bitter irony of her writing in the language of her oppressor,
following Ataturk’s excision of words of Persian, Arabic and Kurdish origin
from the official Turkish lexicon. Truth
eludes language but the truth, let alone justice, is so slow in coming that
there is no vindication when it does break the surface; truth is a “last gift”
grasped “too late” by accident “when I looked back” and it represents only
“harm”, Matur writes in I Know the Unspoken.
Despite Matur’s own lack of faith in
language to convey the truth, the reader is struck loud and clear by her work’s
ringing beauty, effigy-like strength and stillness, its eloquently expressed
pain and its haunting quality of permanence, timelessness and universality. I
meet her in London in the summer of 2017, during a busy week of readings and
talks about If This is a Lament.
What were you like as a little
girl?
I grew up in a Mediterranean
climate, in the cotton fields, with all these oak trees around us, in a very
large tribal family, with five sisters and two brothers. My father’s a farmer, he
used to grow cotton, It was a very picturesque, beautiful scene and there was
this feeling of beauty, of paradise. This was shattered and collapsed by the
tragic events that happened to Kurds and Alevis, all these [military] operations
I witnessed, this massacre [at Maraş] which happened when I was ten.
I was very different from my
siblings and the villagers felt sorry for me, a little girl who was always carrying
big, heavy books, sitting in the shadow if the oak tree, reading Tolstoy and
Zola and Hugo. In my mind I was like the characters from the novels, while the
others were living in a simple, pure, archaic world where life was real, strong
and very earthy. I was writing poetry when I was very young and even then it
wasn’t what I call “pink poetry”. It was very rebellious.
When I was a child, we had a big
house, a family house. The women were cooking and doing their daily things and
I was always on the terrace reading my book. When my mum called me to come and
cook, my father always protected me. He said, “Don’t call Bejan, don’t bother
her, she’s reading.” He always protected me and I always feel his eyes, his
gaze on my shoulder. He was supportive to all my sisters and he sent us all to
good schools – but I continued my education after that. It’s important, in that
kind of society, when you have support from a father.
How did you come to be tortured?
And how did that lead to you becoming a poet?
When people ask me this, I always
give a little smile. Because it’s obvious in Turkey, it’s political: if you are
a Kurdish Alevi, of course you’re put in prison. During my university time I
was always asking questions because of this oppression and inequality. We
weren’t treated as equal citizens as Kurds, as Alevis. It was a basic human
rights problem: they treated Kurds like second class people. We were in a group
with other Alevis, we were talking, so they detained us. And in the end, after
a year, they couldn’t produce any proof [of wrongdoing] so they let us out.
I was tortured in detention during
that year. I was locked in a very dark cell, darkness all around me for more
than twenty days. This darkness was like mercury, very concrete, very strong. I
had no light, I couldn’t see anything, I was trying to not lose my connection
with my being. Then I found a strong feeling dragging me in a kind of shamanic
ritual. I was trying to say something without words; it was a kind of humming. After
a while I found words like diamonds in the darkness. They were shining like
stars and I found them, but I didn’t have a pen and notebook so I couldn’t make
notes. I wish I could have.
Writing poetry wasn’t in my control.
It was the only way that I could heal. I couldn’t stop it. When I heard it, I
had to write it. My early poems are darker, stronger. My latest ones still have
a sense of sorrow, but they are not heavy.
You write your poetry in Turkish.
How do you feel about that?
I have only my second language,
Turkish, to write in. I was born Kurdish, I spoke Kurdish with my family, with
my mother – I still speak in Kurdish with her. My first shock was when I
started primary school, because I had to leave my mother’s language at home. I
was forced to learn Turkish because the education system was in Turkish.
When people say my Turkish poetry
sounds so beautiful and so soft, it makes me feel sorrow because my Turkish
contains my Kurdish. I am writing in a different way compared to other Turkish
poets and writers, because I have another layer of understanding, I come from a
different world, I have a story to tell about the things I witnessed since I
was a child and the things I read about in the history of my people. All these tragedies
bring a feeling of elegy for me, which is what makes it different.
Turkish is the language I was
tortured in – the police were speaking to me in Turkish. Some people say my
poetry is revenge, artistic revenge, taking Turkish and using it back against
them. ‘They’ try to ruin your being, they try to shatter your existence,
paralyse you through torture, through killing, through oppression. And to tell
them NO, I do exist, I am here, I won’t have you to ruin my being, because
hatred is very destructive. In my writing I always try to keep the bitterness away.
Poetry for me was a kind of tool by which I healed my soul and spirit, it was a
kind of consolation or therapy.
I have begun writing more poetry in
Kurdish, which for me is a language of music. It’s like lullabies. Language is
not about grammar or vocabulary; your mother tongue is the music you remember
from your early childhood. The sound of wind, the sound of your mum calling you
when you’re playing somewhere, the sound of the river stream passing by your
house – all this is language. Now I feel in my mind that these sounds are
coming to me in Kurdish.
Do you see your work as political?
I don’t use any political terminology
or political slogans. Nonetheless, my poetry is very political, because being
political is about changing people’s viewpoint, showing them a different way of
seeing things. When my poetry first came out, the first Turkish readers were
shocked, surprised, because my viewpoint was not familiar to them. I was trying
to show them that they have to recognise that we are here, we have a voice, we
are people, we are human, we deserve
respect, we deserve understanding. When I go to my village or to Kurdistan or
all these Alevi societies, the moment they see me they start telling their
stories because they don’t have access to representation, they have no
opportunity to speak about themselves. It’s a kind of responsibility I feel
towards my people.
What is your process?
I don’t have a strategy to write, it
just comes. Usually I hear the sound when I walk, it’s a real shamanic ritual
for me. Then there are two different stages. The first is not in my control,
it’s just a very strong inspiration that comes to me as a kind of music. If I
have a notebook I make notes, but then I leave it, because I want to create a
space, a distance between myself and my first emotions. Poetry is not just
about the raw emotions, it’s more deep and philosophical. The second part is a
very disciplined editing part. Editing, for me, is like making a sculpture. My
first notes are like a piece of marble, then I bring it to my atelier, then I
carve it. I don’t add, I carve until I reach the concrete essence of the
poetry. It’s there, I know the shape, I know the sound, it’s waiting for me.
And I throw away all the emotional stuff. I am very perfectionist about the
things I published.
Your poetry has a mysticism and
spiritual resonancet. Do you see yourself as religious?
I’m not a believer, I don’t believe
in religion and I don’t believe in God. But I use all these allusions because
it’s a cultural thing for me. The environment I grew up in has these
references. I just give them new meanings; it’s a personal ontology, a personal
mythology. The way I use God is very equal: I criticise him, I ask questions.
That’s very Alevi, it’s in my blood.
You tackle huge cultural,
political and historical themes in your work. Do you think poetry can make a
difference?
Before, I thought that politics
could change the world. I took a break from poetry [after her fourth
collection] and did journalism for eight years. I went on TV as a commentator
and my newspaper columns were very effective. They were shaking the country.
But I came to hate all these ready political slogans and clichés. During my
time doing all this activism, I saw that there are minor and major politics,
and that activism is about minor politics. Major politics is about [bigger
things like] natural resources, the arms trade and macro economics. And when
everything is corrupt, on all sides, it all becomes a game. I wanted to go
deeper, to return to literature and defend human rights through literature. Poetry
is everywhere, in political speeches, in social media. Poetry is the essence of
all that. Writing a tweet in 140 characters, having to summarise your feelings
in that space, that’s poetry, and people are always looking for it. Poetry is
the only place that I feel human.
This interview with Bejan Matur
was facilitated by the organisers of the Ledbury Poetry Festival, where Matur performed from If This Is A
Lament in summer 2017. Ledbury is the UK’s biggest poetry festival,
running annually for ten days in late June or early July. A preview of the 2018
festival can be found at www.poetry-festival.co.uk
